06.03.14
After Whitewashing the NSA CBS is Openwashing Microsoft While Bill Gates Smears Edward Snowden
Summary: Openwashing still the focus of Microsoft’s strategy
MICROSOFT IS hiring staff specifically for the task of openwashing the company and it very much shows, especially in recent months [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. The corporate press is helping Microsoft here. It does not care about facts, it cares about its sponsors.
The NSA‘s most notorious whitewasher CBS (which ran an infamous 60-minute propaganda piece for the NSA) continues to give a platform to radicals like Hayden this week. It also gives Microsoft a “propaganda platform” (State Department terminology), with one of the top people in CNET serving this propaganda (Charles Cooper is an executive editor at CNET). FOSS people don’t believe it for a second. It’s the strategy which relies for whitewashing on pseudo-leader Nadella (Gates is still in charge), despite the fact that he has changed nothing (criminal activity continues). It also relies on Microsoft staff and Microsoft-funded ‘analysts’ such as Forrester. The propaganda can be seen here. It’s a collection of talking points, including:
“There has been a real change,” said Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond, noting that while that shift hasn’t yet permeated the entire Microsoft organization — particularly the Windows team, “it’s seeped into enough of the organization that it’s more than just window dressing. There are many example where Microsoft is integrating with, and even creating open source in an effort to grow market share and support customers.
It should not be so shocking that CBS does this hogwash. It loves Microsoft just like it loves the NSA. Speaking of which, Bill Gates not only promotes the NSA's mass surveillance (publicly) but slams Snowden too (in the popular mainstream fashion of false dichotomy). Will Hill notes that Gates indoctrination attack persists in the US (fighting freedom of thought with corporate schooling):
New Orleans public schools are gone. Schools in New Orleans have been converted into segregated, private schools. In general, these don’t perform better than the public schools they replace but they do channel money and power to rich people. Private schools put student records into private databases and give oligarchs even more power over what we think.
There is tremendous resistance to this especially in places where Gates and Broad got their way. Here’s a report about how privatization has hurt poor people which cites the harm done in charter school pioneer, Milwaukee. In New York, Education Historian, Diane Ravitch has some very insightful criticism. In Seattle there is the wonderful Seattle Education Blog with this update about pushback.
In this recent article Ravitch explains the attack on public education as class warfare. That’s true and it’s bad news because the only reliable indicator of academic performance is household income. The rich and powerful don’t want to reform education, they just want to take more money for themselves. Ruining public education gives them money and control for more of the same. [...] more of the same, “character growth” as judged by your corporate overlords, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117615/problem-grit-kipp-and-character-based-education
Perhaps we can sum it all up by saying that Microsoft and Gates are waging a war on people’s minds. █
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